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The Atari ST Book and Writing Input Recognition...

I spend a lot of time thinking about design, it's one of the best things about Atari that has always drawn me into their machines/consoles. They were always ahead of their time. I've been wanting an Atari ST Book for a long time now but have yet to find the perfect one that isn't exceeding $2,000 in price but still with no luck. For some reason, I really started questioning the LCD design layout tonight. What if I told you that the bezel area on the left-hand side was to serve as a form of alternate input recognition for signatures or writing and the ST to translate into text? Seems logical considering the time period was also when they were experimenting with the STPad and hand-written input recognition. I mean... why else have that 'area' there?

Maybe I haven't discovered anything and this isn't news to anyone and it was actually intended to be just that all along but if so, I've never read or heard about it. Judge for yourself:

I haven't been able to get any word back from Mike Fulton or otherwise but apparently there was a GEM Touch program, though most ideally it was intended for the STPad only. No comments still on the left side of the panel that seems to be blank.

I have always wondered about the Atari STylus. I have never read of any hands-on accounts of using this device. I would be interested to hear how good the handwriting recognition was and what the decision-making process was in killing the device. I would like to hear more about the inner-workings of later-era Atari Corporation and what their thought process was on products. For example, why did the CD drive for the ST never come out in any numbers? Why was development of the ST to the STe so slow? Why did it seem like there was often such a chronic shortage of machines? I am sure the Atari: Business is War will have a lot of good information in it.